Wednesday, October 29, 2014

i made this :: zucchini fritters

We got 2 huge zucchinis in our Bountiful Basket over the weekend. I have a secret: Zucchini is one of my least favorite vegetables. We always had a huge garden growing up which immediately equals zucchini meals all summer long. I think because we ate it so much growing up mixed with it's rather bland and somewhat spongey texture { <----- exact reason I strongly dislike eggplant } is why it's low on my ZOMGGIVETOMEALLTHEVEGGIES list. I had been juicing them throughout the summer, but I wanted to try and stretch my Bountiful Basket and make more meals out of it...less juices.

I turned to trusty Pinterest and of course found a vegan zucchini recipe within minutes. Zucchini fritters! I've wanted to try making potato fritters for breakfast/brunch for quite some time now, so I figured this would be a good introduction to the Fritter World. The recipe looked quick, easy and I had 90% of the ingredients on hand. In an effort to reduce buying extra ingredients, I omitted the kalamata olives and capers in the tomato sauce { even though they sounded amazing and we are HUGE olive/caper fans in our house! }, used a white onion in place of green onions, used fresh parsley versus dried oregano in the fritters themselves and omitted the lemon juice because I had juiced the lemon we had on hand for lunch { there goes my theory of less juices more meals }. Oh, and I was able to add a generous amount of basil to the sauce that we had leftover from our pho and quite a decent dash of crushed red peppers because #spicy!

Is it ok to admit I had low expectations for this meal?! I am not fluent in frying thing in general, and may have set our pesky smoke alarm off a few times, but!!!! they turned out so so good! It was yet another meal I was raving about the entire time we ate it. When I first planned this for dinner, I had thought Hunter was going to be out of town but he ended up being home { yay! } so I was a little nervous when I knew it had to feed and fill up 2 people. We each ate about 3-4 fritters and finished up all the sauce and I was completely satisfied! I have another large zucchini left and would most definitely make these again. I think some roasted { or raw! } garlic would be really yummy in the fritters themselves and there are a dozen+ ways to dress up the sauce. Next time I would serve it up with a salad + crispy bread, but all in all I am thrilled with how this turned out!